EVERYONE compares Trump to Hitler, but there is a lot to be said for comparisons to Stalin, too. When I watched Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, being interviewed by Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist, what came to mind was Stalin’s show trial of the old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin in 1938, as it is described by Fitzroy Maclean: “Few things in a long and fairly full life have left a deeper or more horrifying impression on me than the trial of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, which I attended in Moscow in March 1938, or the appalling predicament of the wretched accused, fighting valiantly for what he believed in against desperate odds.”
The comparison might seem like a ludicrous over-reaction. Stalin’s victims were tortured for months, before being put on trial and shot. No one is going to shoot Mr Amodei or send him to a concentration camp, although they might destroy his company and demote him from billionaire status to merely very rich indeed.
His crime was to insist that the Trump government observe the terms of the $200-million contract signed last summer with Anthropic. These forbade the use of the company’s AI models either for mass surveillance of American citizens (foreigners remain fair game) or for use in autonomous weapon systems that could kill people without any human oversight or intervention.
These red lines that Mr Amodei was defending go very pale under careful scrutiny: Mr Amodei has nothing against the use of his technology for mass surveillance of non-American foreigners, while the demand for humans to be in the loop comes down to very little, in practice, when the AI is identifying 80 targets an hour. The human just ticks the boxes, and the results are just as indiscriminate as carpet bombing would be. The reality of such “oversight” is plain in the ruins of Gaza.
Even so, the idea that there should be any ethical constraints on their actions was intolerable to President Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. They acknowledge no authority outside their own desires, and it was horrible to watch Mr Amodei confronted with the brute realities of power.
It put me in mind of the scene that Maclean describes at the close of the Bukharin trial in which the prosecutor mocks one of the victims because his wife had put fragments of the Psalms on a paper into his pocket as a kind of talisman: “Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the most High, shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my strong hold; my God, in him will I trust. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter, and from the noisome pestilence.”
Vyshinski, the prosecutor, had the words read out loud to the court. “To bring you luck!” he said. “There was a roar of laughter”, Maclean writes, “and the court broke up in an atmosphere of general hilarity.”
Bukharin went to his death as a believer in scientific socialism. Mr Amodei and his tech peers believe in scientific capitalism. The two are much more alike than adherents of either believe. So far, scientific socialism has killed many more millions of people, but scientific capitalism is coming up fast on the rails. Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID will eventually kill as many millions of people as the Ukraine famine of the 1930s did, and to no purpose whatsoever.
In both cases, the verdict of apparently scientific authority seems to reduce any appeal to justice to a pointless anachronism. Whether it is the infallible Party or the godlike AI that delivers the judgement of history, there is no appeal possible. “History to the defeated May say alas but cannot help or pardon,” as W. H. Auden wrote in 1937, the year before Bukharin was judicially murdered.
Mr Amodei writes and talks as though it were enough to point out right behaviour, and, if necessary, to suffer for being right. This may be worse than wrong. When the thugs win, justice has been denied; but, when they go on winning, even the idea of justice is annihilated. Nothing remains but the will of the strong. “I don’t need international law,” President Trump told The New York Times in January. “My own morality. My own mind . . . is the only thing that can stop me.”
Yet, Auden later repudiated those famous lines. As a Christian, he came to believe that they were meretricious, and that there was a voice beyond history which could help or pardon.
